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The top 10 sporting gambles

ANDREW SIM

March 21 2004, 12:00am, The Sunday Times

2 The Yellow Sam coup Barney Curley is a bald former priest. As a sworn enemy of bookmakers, he understandably finds it difficult to get money on himself. So he adopts cunning plans, such as the day in 1975 that he backed his own horse, Yellow Sam, to win a race at an obscure Irish course, Bellewstown. In the days before mobile phones, he ordered his men to back the horse in bookies across the country. To prevent news filtering back to the course, a friend blocked Bellewstown’s sole phonebox with an apparently urgent call. The horse won at 20-1, landing Curley more than £300,000

3 The hole-in-one gang In the summer of 1991 Essex boys Paul Simmons and John Carter toured bookie shops nationwide,…